March 14, 2008
Interstellar Trade
I posted about the implications of trading with aliens a few weeks ago. Here’s Paul Krugman on the subject in 1978.
This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on goods in transit be computed with the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved.
(links to a pdf)
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